Grettings and welcome. My name is Joshua Call.  I am a wishful writer who is currently finishing up his last semester at USC (the one in South Carolina) and planning to move on to grad school for an MFA in creative writing, focusing in creative nonfiction.

This blog functions as a depository for my thoughts and my writing, which are essentially the same to me. My original intentions for the website were far more grandiose but…well I realized I have a lot to do before I’m ready to create the quality content I want in a blog (eventually). Nonetheless I like the initial premise: The glass is not half empty, it’s nearly empty. This is a pragmatic view of the world that I try to espouse, in which you recognize the worlds problems but try to do something about it.  I like to think of my writing in this light as well. Originally I wanted to use this concept as a basis for a news blog, but now I use this blog a place for the following:

1) Freewriting exercises. This will just be me sitting at the computer writing about whatever. I might use a phrase as a starting point. I might just follow a thought.

2) Ideas and Information. These posts will look somewhat like my old posts. I get a lot of ideas and find a lot of cool info that I’d like to keep in one place. This would be a good place to do that.

3) Reviews and thoughts on other works.  I’m going to try to start reading a lot of books and deposit my thoughts and comments here for that as well

4) Rough drafts and pieces of actual work. It’s somewhat of a problem to post all of my work online since it is technically “published” at that point, as far as I understand. Therefore I mostly just post rough drafts and parts of work.  I post an occasional full piece.  For those who aren’t all that familiar with my writing, most of what I do is creative nonfiction, also called New Journalism. The basic types are something like this:

• Lyric essay: A short poetic contemplation on a subject, usually with a few scenes that are often disconnected, expecting the reader to work a bit to get the meaning
• Memior/Personal essay: A contemplation on my life and history
• Experience: A piece about something of which I am somewhat of an expert–a portion of my every day life written for those who don’t know. Granted, this resembles memoir and since my experiences aren’t really all that unique or particularly interesting, I won’t be doing many of these (most people who do these already have a job, like they are a cop or a doctor or politician and write about the “life of a cop”
• Experiment: Conducting a interesting experiment to see what experience you get from it.  For example, what if I walk to school for a week. I think I might do that one.
• Travel: Obvious. In my case, traveling is currently limited but I might be able to work something out.
• Explanation: This is the most common form of literary journalism, you simply find a topic and explain it in an interesting and well-written way. These are what I want to spend most of my time doing.
• Collage: The collage is just like a collage of pictures but with words.  These are really fun to do and I want to do a lot more of them (I’ve only ever written one).  The point of these is to be very discreet, you don’t want the reader to automatically know what you are talking about. The pieces should feel broken up and disjointed but in the end they ought to come together in a cool way. I’d like to experiment with some New Media collages as well, meaning I use things like pictures, movies, and hyperlinks online
• New Media posts: I’m going to throw this one up there just because I might also want it as a separate classification. This would be writing that centers around new forms of writing combined with video, hyperlinks, and pictures. Or in my case I may just classify posts/works that are things you’d normally find online as “new media.” For example, all of those “10 things about x” posts…Not sure if most people would make this distinction or not.

Those are the traditional forms. I also, for my own purposes want to experiment with something else that I do but doesn’t really constitute a form as of yet. I’m not sure if anyone would ever accept it as a form of nonfiction but I like it and may eventually try to spin off a blog to focus solely on it. Regardless it is good practice in thoughts and in language usage:

• Poetic philosophy/Dramatic Journaling.  I’m not sure which to call it. A good example is what i did here. Basically this is a rough form of philosophy with as much attention to form and language as there is to ideas. Often times this involves a dramatic sense of journaling, hence the other name, in which I contemplate and think about my life in terms that are both dramatic (I’m good at that) and philosophical. My journals, btw, are more thoughts than scenes so to me dramatic journaling and poetic philosophy are quite the same.  I’m not sure what will come of this. Just a note: unlike all the other forms above, this is the only one that will not be focused/centered around scene, instead it will be centered around ideas even though scenes will sometimes enter. So it is most likely far more abstract and people will probably find it less enjoyable. We’ll see where that goes.

This is me.

Email me at ethersong@gmail.com if you have any comments or questions about my writing, want to tell me I suck, or otherwise send me spam.